The Sun Collective by Charles Baxter

Author:Charles Baxter [Baxter, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

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Standing there, he remembered the churring locusts announcing the late-summer heat and invisibly clinging to the trees, as he remembered the telephone poles with their sagging wires leading away from the farm and following the county road down to the horizon flatly untroubled by hills. A tame crow whom they had named Bucky hung around the barn. Wind preceding a thunderstorm knocked the roof off the toolshed, and a bolt of lightning electrocuted the commune’s mascot, Nelly, a goat. At times the place seemed under a curse. The farm spread itself out on just over one hundred acres, hardly enough for sustainability, and only one of its members (the one who’d grown up in Iowa) actually knew how to plant, cultivate and harvest, pack and sell the fruits and vegetables they grew. Their only real source of steady income was the U-Pick apple orchard alongside the driveway. In August, their car wouldn’t start, and they couldn’t afford to buy a new battery for it. They didn’t know how they would get through the winter. Day after day, as the commune members grew poorer and more quarrelsome and sicker and hungrier, Brettigan watched the disappearance of their good intentions until, near the end of his stay, the beauty of their ideals, which had given them all an initial shine of attractiveness and energy and humor, turned to bad-tempered, moody despairs: no one was sleeping with anyone else; sex had become inconceivable, as had square meals; conversation had given way to remarks; and even the commune’s dog, Lila, had run away.

He remembered their names: Opal, Sarah, and a girl who had once been Barbara but had renamed herself SkyAir; and Big Mike, Little Mike, and Ben, a former philosophy major who rarely spoke. Brettigan himself was not a charter commune member, just a visitor who had been tolerated because he was willing to work on their plumbing and wiring and had brought some money with him (he had befriended Little Mike at summer camp when they’d both been counselors a few years earlier). When Brettigan left, no one had bothered to say goodbye. He felt like a defector. He had had his first lesson in loving what people were trying to do without being able to love them as individuals.

And yet there had been moments now and then in the late afternoons and early evenings when he had finished his day’s work and rested on the front porch’s swing, and a peacefulness took him over, a calm spiritual ease that he had rarely, if ever, felt before in his life. A physical sensation, it began in his chest and moved outward. The churring of the locusts was like the pumping of blood through his veins and arteries. Somehow he knew that his heart brought him life and was a tree itself with roots and branches. No tasks pressed upon him; he had worked so hard all day that his face and hands were gritty with the evidence of his labor.

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